Blame Bush First

While watching coverage of the London bombing, I wondered how long it would take the Left to blame Bush for causing it.

Not long. A few minutes later I saw footage of Hillary speaking in the Senate. She was saying something about how Bush needed to spend more on national security (for Britain?).

By the weekend a consensus appeared among the mainstream left that the bombing repudiated Bush's "flypaper" strategy in Iraq - that it is better to have the terrorists attacking our soldiers in Iraq than our civilians in America. Never mind that this seems to have been perpetrated by a small group within Britain while September 11 involved people from multiple countries and three years of planning.

Eric Alterman started with a story saying that authorities are investigating the possibility that the terrorists trained in Iraq and ran with it. In Alterman's alternate reality a routine investigation becomes a certainty with the implication that the British terrorists would not have been able to learn bomb making without Iraq.

All of that is nothing, though. Comments at the Daily Kos suggested that Bush and Blair arranged for the attack themselves in order to distract people from the G8 conference. All of this got so bad that Kos removed the comments.

Others remain. Here is one conspiracy monger who is convinced that the British set up July 7 and that the US set up September 11.

All of this ignores a few important points. The most important is that the terrorists were attacking us prior to Iraq or even Afghanistan. They began planning September 11 in 1998 while Clinton was still president and peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians looked promising.

We are not dealing with reasonable people. Withdrawing from Iraq is currently their top demand but if they are successful, what will their next demand be?